Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Is “GIACOMO JOYCE” GOOD OR BAD ART?

  Difficult to answer, even discounting the extent to which it is not art at all but personal therapy and private communication. Parts of it sing with the familiar voice: “She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal.” Some images bring the heroine into good focus: “A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs.… The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.” Other images float oddly, unattached: “Long lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded molluscs.” Some of the writing is Joyce at his most palely swooning: “Her eyes have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood my soul, itself dissolving, has poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed.” Some of it is mere noise: “Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!” And some downright trite: “This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?” These many glimpses, exclamations, and parodic spurts, though anticipating, in Ellmann’s happy phrase, the “clashing of dictions” that becomes the method of Ulysses, do not quite hang together, perhaps because they are engraved upon a personal incident that remains obscure rather than upon the mundane, mappable events of Bloomsday. Giacomo Joyce does point up the lack of psychological presence Joyce’s characters, even in the masterworks, often have. His dialogue, for example, where it is not comic or telegraphic (and largely excepting Dubliners), more suggests worked-up notes than the living exchange of speech. The key utterance in Giacomo Joyce is Amalia’s saying, “Because otherwise I could not see you,” a remark which meant so much to Joyce that he gives it twice to Beatrice Justice in Exiles; neither here nor there does it make much sense. In both places the statement, like many things said in Ulysses, arrives unprepared-for, devoid of context, and without weight. Compared to Tolstoy’s protagonists or those of Henry James, Joyce’s characters do not take each other seriously; they seem detached, for all the formal significance arrayed behind them, from concern with their own fate, and move sluggishly beneath the semi-opaque thickness of their artistic rendering. They are the creations of an artist-God who is himself “refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Indeed, Giacomo Joyce is most interesting for its illustration of a stage of the aesthetic sequence that Stephen Dedalus expounds to Lynch in Chapter Five of A Portrait, which was completed later in 1914, and abounds in echoes of Giacomo; Stephen might well have this tiny work in mind as marking the exact point where the lyrical form—“the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion”—becomes the simplest epical form, “when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event.… The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea.” Giacomo anticipates not only the triumph but the limits of Ulysses. We do not see as well in water as in air, and the chief character Joyce’s books glorify is himself, the writer as God and oceanic mind, the frail and arrogant sponger/saint with the black eye patch, holding all literature and languages inside his head, mixed with “pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and lots of glass.” It is this monstrous and marvellous self-dramatization whose adventures we follow in his books, whose fanaticism transfigures gritty old photographs of Dublin and Paris, and whose relics we revere.

  Remembrance of Things Past Remembered

  “ONLY THREE OR FOUR BOOKS IN A LIFETIME,” Swann says in Remembrance of Things Past, “give us anything that is of real importance.” For a book to be great in a reader’s life it is not enough for the book to be great; the reader must be ready. I began to read Proust the first months I lived in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive. I was twenty-three, newly a father, newly employed. Since boyhood I had wanted to live in New York. I had wanted to work for the magazine that now I did work for. I had wanted to be a writer and now a few poems and short stories were filtering into print. In this atmosphere, then, of dreams come true, I opened my wife’s tattered college copy of Swann’s Way; she used to read under a sun lamp, and the cover was stained by a spot of oil. While our baby cooed in her white, screened crib, and the evening traffic swished north on the West Side Highway, and Manhattan at my back cooled like a stone, and my young wife fussed softly in our triangular kitchen at one of the meals that, by the undeservable grace of marriage, regularly appeared, I would read:

  … if my aunt were feeling “upset,” she would ask instead for her “tisane,” and it would be my duty to shake out of the chemist’s little package on to a plate the amount of lime-blossom required for infusion in boiling water. The drying of the stems had twisted them into a fantastic trellis, in whose intervals the pale flowers opened, as though a painter had arranged them there, grouping them in the most decorative poses. The leaves, which had lost or altered their own appearance, assumed those instead of the most incongruous things imaginable, as though the transparent wings of flies or the blank sides of labels or the petals of roses had been collected and pounded, or interwoven as birds weave the material for their nests. A thousand trifling little details—the charming prodigality of the chemist—details which would have been eliminated from an artificial preparation, gave me, like a book in which one is astonished to read the name of a person whom one knows, the pleasure of finding that these were indeed real lime-blossoms, like those I had seen, when coming from the train, in the Avenue de la Gare, altered, but only because they were not imitations but the very same blossoms, which had grown old. And as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time; but beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden roses—marking, as the radiance upon an old wall still marks the place of a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree which had and those which had not been “in bloom”—shewed me that these were petals which, before their flowering-time, the chemist’s package had embalmed on warm evenings of spring. That rosy candlelight was still their colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life which was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower. Presently my aunt was able to dip in the boiling infusion, in which she would relish the savour of dead or faded blossom, a little madeleine, of which she would hold out a piece to me when it was sufficiently soft.†

  A thousand other passages equally wonderful could be quoted from the four thousand pages of Proust’s novel. Everyone knows of the madeleine from whose long-forgotten taste the whole of Combray sprang into renewed being; the paragraph I have quoted gives us the tea direct, as it was fed by Aunt Léonie to little “Marcel.” Hemingway would have rendered this action in twenty words; Balzac, in a hundred and made us feel the chemist’s shop, and hear the ring of francs on the counter. Proust’s tendrilous sentences seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith. It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes—the vanished fresco, the book holding the known name—that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.

  The passage manifests the work’s great theme: the metamorphoses wrought by Time. This sense of metamorphosis—tied to Proust’s neurasthenically keen sense of the organic, especially of botany—carries into the tragic, temporal dimension Proust’s peculiar sensitivity to changing perspectives. Perspectives change in space (the steeples at Martinville), in the heart (Swann’s views of Odette), in society (Mme. Verdurin’s rise; Swann as seen in Combray and in Paris). External reality is but a cluster of moments no two of which subtend the same angle. This is impressionism, but impressionism on the move, whether the moving object is the narrator’s life or the “little train” to Balbec:

  … but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs sti
ll blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent nacre of night, beneath a firmament still powdered with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it afresh, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of it and a continuous picture.

  Einstein used moving trains to illustrate the special theory of relativity, propounded in 1905. Also in 1905, Proust’s mother died, releasing him to final loneliness and earnest search for entrée into his own endowment, his precocious powers of evocation. In his relativity Proust is a modern, though the modern most lavish with old-fashioned virtues—characterization, ambitious scale, idealistic rapture, stylistic confidence. Remembrance of Things Past is to 19th-century novels as a magic lantern is to little landscape models with plaster hills, matchstick houses, and trees of green sponge. Proust abolished the nagging contradiction between the author as God and the author as nebulous character, as reader’s confidant. In Proust’s cosmos, Marcel (so called only once, in an elaborately hedged aside) is both the most supine of witnesses and the mightiest of creators. There is no “outside” to the firmament of his skull. His perceptions are not derived from substance; they are substance. And the plot is not what connects the images and gestures and masks; their enclosure within one field of perception is the plot, the drama. Our excitement as we traverse these immensities of prose has to do with their Providential coherence: microcosmically, with the dissecting delicacy of each sentence and the ecology of mutual assistance the tender images extend toward one another; and macrocosmically, with the thrilling leaps of far-flung continuations (Vinteuil’s manifestations, for example, or De Forcheville’s reappearance after three thousand pages, to marry Odette) and a grand architectural completeness (the Swann side, in Gilberte, unites with the Guermantes side, in Saint-Loup, to produce a daughter who, we are told casually, “later on married an obscure man of letters”). As in a cathedral, organic profusion is subdued to a design. It might be said that by deviating from his original design (circa 1909) of two Testamental volumes—the way of innocence and the way of experience—to insert the immense dirge to Agostinelli (d. 1914) that comprises the Albertine books, Proust created a Flamboyant rather than a Romanesque cathedral. Yet, without those sometimes monotonous stretches of misty Albertine, how much would be diminished the culminating effect of vastness, of dizzying height? Time Regained ends with acrophobia. Like Marcel, the reader turns “giddy at seeing so many years below and in me as though I were leagues high.” Among other writers only Dante lifts us to such an altitude.

  Like Dante, Proust lives in one work. There is a great dropping off elsewhere. We read Jean Santeuil or Contre Sainte-Beuve, or try to, much as we read Proust’s nattering letters, or criticism of him—for the lover’s pleasure of being with Proust and being reminded of the raptures he has given us. No other 20th-century writer has inspired such a bulk of appreciation and analysis; the shelves at Widener Library include the bound bulletins of La Societé des Amis de Marcel Proust et des Amis de Combray. In English the Proust chapters by Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle and by Harry Levin in The Gates of Horn show omnivorous critics sagaciously digesting; the small books by Howard Moss and Roger Shattuck with special affection polish and refocus some of the lenses of Proust’s panopticon; and the brilliant two-volume biography by George Painter in one sense offers more adventure than À la Recherche du Temps Perdu itself, since in Painter’s account we see Proust journeying toward the mastery that the novel possesses from the very first page. There are also Samuel Beckett’s rather acerb essay and, in translation by Elsie Prell, a memoir by François Mauriac that combines a young writer’s awe at the “sudden occupation of the literary heaven by the Proustain constellation,” a generous appraisal from a Catholic viewpoint of the corrosion and stagnation felt to overtake the latter half of the masterpiece, and a vivid personal recollection of “that gloomy room on the rue Hamlin, that black den, that bed where an overcoat served as a blanket, that waxy mask through which it could have been said our host watched us eat, and whose hair alone seemed living.” Proust is not only the greatest modern creator of characters; he is among modern authors the most amusing character, the most self-dramatizing (see his letters) and bizarre, whose corklined room has become the very symbol of hypertrophied aestheticism. In 1971 the hundredth anniversary of his birth was observed in the American literary press with tributes, by such writers as Melvin Maddocks and William Gass, surprisingly grudging and irritated in tone, even jeering—as if in these distributors of contemporary relevance had been reborn those fin-de-siècle smarts, the Comte de Montesquiou and his peers, who could not believe that “little Proust,” that sickly parasite and queer half-Jew, had vaulted over them into immortality.

  American readers in general, I suspect, have been put off by the unwieldy, intimidating twin-elephant Random House edition of Remembrance of Things Past. Better to read it in the seven Modern Library volumes, now reprinted in a Vintage paperback edition, and better still to obtain the charming twelve volumes of the English edition by Chatto & Windus (this edition has recently been disfigured by the insertion of totally insipid pencil illustrations by Philippe Jullian, but they can be excised with a razor blade). The pagination of the Chatto & Windus edition (and, but for Swann’s Way, the Modern Library edition, which was a photograph of it) fits the extremely useful index-guide compiled by P. S. Spalding, which serves not only as a memory freshener as one reads along but as a way to extract all the references to, say, Hawthorn, Heredity, or Victor Hugo from their vast matrix.‡

  Americans also, perhaps in their zeal for practical instruction, tend to expect too much of Proust as a social critic. Satire of snobs and anatomizing of society occur, of course, and Proust was a climber in his day; but a personal obsession should not be confused with an artistic one. He writes about aristocrats, in their banality and glamour, their vanity and gallantry, because they are there: were there, in the life he has ceased to live, the life that lostness has bathed in paradisiacal colors. As soon call Proust an anti-snob as a gargoyle-carver anti-devil; hatred is swallowed in an art of homage. Proust would take the entire living population of France as a trésor trouvé, a paleontological imprint left by the past, a clue to the central mystery of France herself, with her cathedrals, her blossoms, her place names. As the hero, aging, discovers deceit everywhere and absurdity everywhere, only two things remain worth loving: Marcel and France, which are everything. The book is not a tract but a religious travail.

  In those August and September Manhattan days, themselves now paradisiacal, when I first read Proust, I also began to read Kierkegaard. College had left them out of my education; now I embraced them. I was not only a would-be writer but a would-be Christian. I was happy, but happiness, as Harold Brodkey observed in a short story from those same 1950’s, makes us afraid. And Proust and Kierkegaard seemed (though both had been petite men) two giant brothers, whose bullying and showing-off I forgave because between them I could walk safely down the street, the street of my life. The remorseless pessimism of Proust’s disquisitions on the heart, the abyss he makes of human motives, the finality of all our little deaths, did not appall me; morbid myself, I only trusted morbidity. In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness. Proust was one of those men—increasingly rare, as faith further ebbs—who lost the consolations of belief but retained the attitudes and ambitions of a worshipper. For all his biochemistry, Proust emphasizes the medieval duality of body/spirit: “the body imprisons the spirit in a fortress.” For all the disillusion and cruelty it depicts, Remembrance of Things Past is, like the Bible, a work of consolation. Einstein’s relativity developed its formulas from the recognition of an absolute, the speed of light. Marcel, having experienced—in the madeleine, in the uneven paving stones�
��“a sense of eternity,” vows to “leave this behind me to enrich others with my treasure.” The next sentence goes on to uncover in his momentary “sense of eternity” a strangely modest secret, a kind of Godless Golden Rule and the germinating principle of art: